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The strongest industry in the April retail sales report is the non-store retailers, Amazon being the largest. The weakest industry being department stores. Although this is making a lot of press recently, this is not a new phenomena, but it seems to have finally come home to roost for the department store stocks. If you look at department store sales, they are the mirror opposite of the e-commerce sales. In fact, the peak for department store sales was January 2001. Back then, department store sales were 33% higher than non-store retailers at $19.9B for the month. If you zoom out in the graphs below, this move to online shopping has been consistent and has been putting the hurt to the department stores for years.
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According to the numbers in the April retail sales report, non-store retailer sales are almost 3.5x as large as department store sales at over $45B.
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Amazon is reported to be the second largest apparel retailer behind only Wal-Mart. How long before Amazon takes the top spot?
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